Joe White

Joe White's Biography

2024 Melbourne Comedy Festival Season Award for Best Performance!

Joe White, formal name Tilahun Hailu is a four years in a row Fringe World Festival best comedy weekly award winner and recipient of the West Australian newspaper comedy choice award. One of six siblings born to Ethiopian parents Yezina and Mulu.

Amidst love, heartbreak, failure and success Joe has always tried to find the upside in life and this has been his inspiration for pursuing comedy. He has experienced many hardships in life and this has taught him the value of laughter in life. Now his passion is to make others laugh too.

Joe White is the first Ethiopian stand up comedian to play the biggest arts festival in the world, the Edinburgh fringe festival. His career started out with the launch of his first solo show “Ethiopian & Not Hungry” which went on to sell out and win countless awards. He followed it with his second hit solo show “Ethiopian and Still Not Hungry”. His second show sold thousands of tickets nationally and internationally winning him “best comedy awards” and a “critics choice” award. With millions of views online and thousands of fans, these days you can find him touring nationally, internationally, hosting private events and working on radio and tv shows. Joe White is one of the most exciting new comedians to come out of Australia!

One of Joe’s career highlights was being chosen to support International comedians such as Omid Djalili who appeared in the hit movie “The Mummy” alongside Brendan Fraser, Max Amini and Maz Jobrani. Max and Maz are brilliant stand-up comics from the USA. Maz has featured in many films including: The Interpreter, Dragonfly and Friday After Next (alongside Ice Cube & Mike Epps). The tours saw Joe perform to a total crowd of more than 10,000 comedy lovers in four different states around Australia.

In June 2016, Joe White became an ambassador for the Katina Woodruff Children’s Foundation. He is very proud to be one of the ambassadors for this great foundation as it is a cause very close to his heart.

The Katina Woodruff Children’s Foundation is a not-for-profit foundation that works with refugee children coming from countries all over the world including Afghanistan, Iran, China, India, Burundi, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea and many more. The Foundation assists with recovery from traumatic immigration experiences to help these children and their families transition into the Australian way of life. The foundation was set up by Katina Woodruff-Roberts who is a child Anthropologist that has dedicated her whole life to finding new ways to help affected children.

Joe himself first immigrated to Australia 20 years ago as a refugee with his family and he understands the struggles of the transition. Unfortunately, Joe’s father Mulu fell victim to alcoholism and was abusive and at the age of seven years old his father walked out on the family leaving Joe’s mum Yezina to raise him and his siblings. Sadly, they spent many nights homeless and on the streets in war torn Sudan until his mother managed to get them out of the country via a refugee humanitarian visa.